I've been thinking a bit lately about the language features that I find indispensible: that is, if I'm hacking about in a language that doesn't have one of these, I either implement it right away, if possible, or miss it terribly and grumble about its absence.

My "must-have" feature list is, in part:

If I spend much more time playing around with Haskell, I'll probably want to add argument pattern-matching, lazy evaluation (Update 2004/07/01: including non-strictness, of course), and currying to that list.

It's interesting (although not too surprising) to me that my list of must-have features has changed so much in the past few years: back then, I'd probably have listed such low-level arcana as predictable memory layouts and pointer arithmetic. Back then, though, I was doing a lot of bare-metal C hacking; these days, I'm much more interested in functional programming.

It's admirable that Perl gives me what I want, and usually with at most as much fuss as any other language would (although sub {...} for lambdas is a bit verbose).

--
F o x t r o t U n i f o r m
Found a typo in this node? /msg me
% man 3 strfry

In reply to Indispensible language features by FoxtrotUniform

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.